MARC 880 ≠6 and “Multilingual” SMARCQL

I’m almost two months into retirement and decided to give my video game controller a break. Just to mix it up a bit, I decided to add a new MARC+SPARQL=SMARCQL feature.

One of the nice things about RDF is support for multiple languages and scripts. For example, here is a simple Wikidata query that lists Henry Petroski’s name in various scripts:

https://w.wiki/565Q

MARC also has the ability to capture information in multiple scripts, but the mechanism isn’t as straightforward. Instead, fields cataloged with alternate scripts are paired using an 880 field via a structured ≠6 “Linkage” subfield. Here, then, are examples of Henry Petroski’s name as they might be recorded in MARC records:

100 ≠6 880-01 ≠a Petroski, Henry.
880 ≠6 100-01/$1 ≠a 佩特罗斯基.

or possibly

880 ≠6 100-01/(2/r ≠a פטרוסקי, הנרי.

The ≠6 structure contains up to 4 components described in detail here:

≠6 [linking tag]-[occurrence number]/[script identification code]/[field orientation code]

Earlier SMARCQL releases left the ≠6 parsing and lookup as an exercise for users. The latest release, however, parses the ≠6 components as RDF triples and adds skos:exactMatch triples to connect the corresponding fields. Including these in the triplestore allows for some new analysis possibilities. For example, here is a query that lists variant scripts for the latin name “Petroski, Henry.” as they exist in the MARC test set:

PREFIX code: <https://w3id.org/smarcql/code/>
PREFIX skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#>

SELECT DISTINCT ?latinName ?altName ?script
WHERE {
  VALUES ?latinName {"Petroski, Henry."}
         
  ?field code:sa ?latinName ;
    skos:exactMatch [
      code:s6_scriptIdentificationCode [rdfs:label ?script] ;
      code:sa ?altName
    ]
}

latinName	altName	script
Petroski, Henry.	佩特罗斯基.	Chinese, Japanese, Korean
Petroski, Henry.	פטרוסקי, הנרי.	Hebrew

Keep in mind that the ability to query terms across multiple scripts using SMARCQL doesn’t imply there is one and only one Henry Petroski being referred to. For that, the query would have to take ≠0 or ≠1 identifiers into account or else adapt the query to include contextual information for downstream reconciliation using a tool like OpenRefine.